The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will now be required to make public all of the research it funds 12 months after it's published. For the vertical search space this provides a huge boost as we'll be able to crawl the complete text of papers and make useful searchable products from them.
ReadWriteWeb brought this to my attention in their post NIH: $29b in Health Science Set to Go Online for Free. Here's their take on it;
This should open up a whole world of new opportunities for online research. Readers outside of the academic world but aware of the financial future of health information online in the commercial sector can imagine the analogous excitement about this announcement for academic researchers.